User:Cinteotl/historicity

This page consists of general notes and citations on the subject of historicity. For my own use, primarily.

Quotes on Historicity
"The dictionary definition of 'historicity' is 'historical quality or authenticity based on fact.' Historicity is a quality of a discourse perhaps, or even of an opinion. The most general concept would be something like this: the historicity of a claim about the past is its factual status."

"Modern european philosophy [German Geschichtlichkeit or Historizität, also translated as historicality, a term in the phenomenological tradition denoting the feature of our human situation by which we are located in specific concrete temporal and historical circumstances] For Dilthey, historicity identifies human beings as unique and concrete historical beings. According to Jaspers , it involves an essential characteristic of everything that is concrete and not universal and represents a synthesis of freedom and necessity . For Heidegger , historicity has two senses. First, Dasein must be understood as contextualized by the stream of concrete events of world history. The second and more fundamental sense is based on Heidegger's claim that Dasein is not an object , but a life history, a happening, an unfolding between birth and death and a flowing outward into the future and backward into the past. Hence historicity is defined by Heidegger in terms of temporalization or structure of temporality. It denotes Dasein 's way of taking up the possibilities of the past by projecting itself onto its own most possibility of being-as-whole. The human past is constitutive of the self and its future possibilities. Heidegger himself saw difficulties in the harmonization of these two senses. “Authentic Being-towards-death – that is to say, the finitude of temporality ..."

"[H]istoricity, focuses on the truth value of knowledge claims about the past (denoting historical actuality, authenticity, and factuality) Wandersee, J. H. (1992), The historicality of cognition: Implications for science education research. J. Res. Sci. Teach., 29: pp. 423–434."

"Let us proceed to the demarcation of the historical phenomenon in comparison to other phenomena. In what does the historicity of a phenomenon consist? What aspects and specific particularities distinguish historical phenomena from others? It has often been affirmed that historicity is a dimension of all natural phenomena that take place in space and time, including, naturally, psycho-spiritual phenomena. Historicity in this very general and diluted sense is confused with existence as a link in a rather temporal chain of events. According to some theoreticians, any concrete phenomenon that occurs in time, being an act that “becomes,” whether physical, biological, or psychological, may be seen in a historical perspective. In a similarly broad sense it would be possible to speak, for example, about the “history” of the sun and of the earth from their nebulous beginnings up to today. In the context of such considerations the observation has also been made that all phenomena, from the material to the spiritual, would be “singular” events, always individualized and irreversible. Temporality and singularity, individual and irreversible, were transformed into essential attributes of historical phenomena.

There are several famous thinkers according to whom “historicity” consists in the serial occurrence in time of phenomena that are unique in their own way and that cannot be exactly repeated. The theoreticians that have adopted this perspective concerning the “history” of human acts and achievements do nothing but arbitrarily isolate a domain, a zone, in an area as vast as the world. In place of a qualitative and structural differentiation between “history” and “nature,” they merely carve out a sector in the framework of nature, doing so arbitrarily and without any logical justification. For our part, we believe that historicity is an attribute reserved to certain human phenomena (354) having a uniquely special structure – which is actually in agreement with the practice of historiography.

Let us anticipate a little, so that we can move forward. We view historicity as a specifically human dimension, and it has its own structures that, although they “become” in time, cannot be confused with just any “becoming.”"

"Prior to the Reformation and its sequaelae, biblical interpretation moved forward under the working assumption that text and history were conterminous, or at least that the history behind the text was not the sole or determinative factor in meaning-making. Modernity, however, posited a purposeful segregation of 'history' and 'text'. Consequently, the events to which the biblical text allegedly gives witness and the biblical text that provides such a witness were no longer presumed to be coterminous. Since interpretive privilge is accorded to 'history' in this perspective, biblical interpretation was construed as a discipline of 'validation' (when the biblical text is judged to represent historical events with accuracy) or of 'reconstruction" (when it is not). And this interpretive agenda would eventuate in the state of affairs that generally characterizes our current situation."

"Once history, the mimesis of actuality in narrative prose, existed as a genre, the issues of accuracy (truth to actuality) and the intellectual and linguistic protocols for regulating historicity in prose were treated with boredom and manipulative indifference most of the time, wherever history was written.""

Historicity: "[t]he temporal structuralizations of social actions and processes. Hall, J. (2007). Historicity and Sociohistorical Research. In W. Outhwaite, & S. Turner (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Science Methodology. (pp. 82-102). London, England: SAGE Publications Ltd. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781848607958.n5

Hall, J. (2007). History, methodologies, and the study of religion. In J. Beckford, & N. Demerath (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of the sociology of religion. (pp. 167-189). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781848607965.n9

""HISTORICITY - (Also historicality) This notion figures prominently in phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, It refers to a fundamental or essential feature of human existence, namely, that we are not merely in history, but belong to history. History (or tradition), in other words, is not something external to us, objective, or past; rather, it is a dynamic force that enters into all efforts to understand., Thus, our history (or tradition) is not something that can be overcome by a method that would make objective knowledge possible in the human sciences. The historical character of our being is not a limitation or restriction on our ability to know but the very condition or principle of understanding. Taken to its extreme, the notion of historicity is equivalent to radical relativism or universal perspectivism.""

Quotes from biblical scholars
{{Quote|Even so, it is conspicuous how at the same time as the philosophical concept of historicity developed in the thought of Dilthey and York the same term was cropping up in Protestant theology in the sense of historical facticity (the historical by contrast to what is mythical, fictional and legendary); indeed, strictly speaking the concept of historicity was always related "to a single problem, namely to the historicity of Jesus Christ, which became a critical issue for the modern history of religion and for biblical scholarship."

{{Quote|What we call the historical Jesus is the composite of the recoverable bits and pieces of historical information and speculation about him that we assemble, construct, and reconstruct. For this reason, the historical Jesus is, in Meier's words, "a modern abstraction and construct." }}

{{Quote|Two facts in the life of Jesus command almost universal assent... One is Jesus' baptism by John. The other is his death by crucifixion. Because they rank so high on the 'almost impossible to doubt or deny' scale of historical 'facts', they are obvious starting points for an attempt to clarify the what and why of Jesus' mission." }}

{{Quote|The early church was also not interested in the historical figure of Jesus, that is, in the life and personality of the Jesus who walked and taught in Galilee. Kähler was right: the only Jesus who meets us through the pages of the Gospels... is the Christ of faith." }}

Background on Dunn:

{{Quote|In evaluating a work such as this, one must understand the foundational principles of the author. In addition to his New Perspective position (to be fully fleshed out in the next volume) particularly problematic for the evangelical is his view of Scripture. Through affirming a “high” position for Scripture, he is not an inerrantist. He stated his position clearly in another work in which, commenting on the historical reliability of the Synoptic Gospels, he stated, "We therefore can make the strong and confident affirmation that the Synoptic Gospels are a source of historical information about Jesus; the Evangelists were concerned with the historicity of what they remembered; in burden of proof terms we can start from the assumption that Synoptic tradition is a good witness to the historical Jesus unless proven otherwise" (“The Historicity of the Synoptic Gospels,” in Crisis in Christology: Essays in Quest of Resolution, ed. William D. Farmer [Livonia, Mich.: Dove Booksellers, 1995], 216). }}

{{Quote|"The conclusion seems unavoidable that, in historical Jesus research, adequate attention had not been given to epistemic (methodological) issues, In the social scientific approach one does find efforts to enunciate aspects such as presuppositions, theories, models and methods." }}

{{Quote|[S]urely the rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth should be tested to see what weight it can bear, or even to work out what kind of historical research might be appropriate. Such a normal exercise should hardly generate controversy in most fields of ancient history, but of course New Testament studies is not a normal case and the highly emotive and dismissive language of, say, Bart Ehrman’s response to Thompson’s The Mythic Past shows (if it needed to be shown), not that the matter is beyond dispute, but that the whole idea of raising this question needs to be attacked, ad hominem, as something outrageous. }}

{{Quote|I don’t think, however, that in another 20 years there will be a consensus that Jesus did not exist, or even possibly didn’t exist, but a recognition that his existence is notentirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability. In the first place, what does it mean to affirm that ‘Jesus existed’, anyway, when so many different Jesuses are displayed for us by the ancient sources and modern NT scholars? Logically, some of these Jesuses cannot have existed. So in asserting historicity, it is necessary to define which ones (rabbi, prophet, sage, shaman, revolutionary leader, etc.) are being affirmed—and thus which ones deemed unhistorical. In fact, as things stand, what is being affirmed as the Jesus of history is a cipher, not a rounded personality (the same is true of the King David of the Hebrew Bible, as a number of recent ‘biographies’ show). }}

Source material for historicity of Jesus at infidels.org

{{Quote|The historicity of Jesus is distinct from the related study of the historical Jesus, which, according to James Dunn, "is properly speaking a nineteenth- and twentieth-century construction using the data supplied by the Synoptic tradition, not Jesus back then," (the Jesus of Nazareth who walked the hills of Galilee), "and not a figure in history whom we can realistically use to critique the portrayal of Jesus in the Synoptic tradition." (Was in article - but removed by others)}}

Religious truth
"Christian truth is based upon the history, revelation and testimony from the Bible, and are central to Christian beliefs. Some Christians believe that other authorities are sources of doctrinal truth — such as in Roman Catholicism, the Pope is said to beinfallible when pronouncing on certain, rather specific, matters of church doctrine.[2] The central person in Christianity, Jesus, claimed to be Truth when he said, "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life; no one comes to the Father but through me."[3] Truth is thus considered to be an attribute of God. In Christian Science, (not recognised as a Christian organization by the bulk of mainstream churches) Truth is God.[4] Christian philosopher William Lane Craig notes that the Bible typically uses the words true or truth in non-philosophical senses to indicate such qualities as fidelity, moral rectitude, and reality. However, it does sometimes use the word in the philosophical sense of veracity.[5] Religious truth"

Random quotes
"Do you believe in the existence of Socrates? Alexander the Great? Julius Caesar? If historicity is established by written records in multiple copies that date originally from near contemporaneous sources, there is far more proof for Christ’s existence than for any of theirs."

""I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus' contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus.""